‘Mind the window.’
I thought of the lucky shot that killed Deku. Tim squatted down again. We weren’t filming. I fished my camera out of the blue bag and switched on. It seemed okay.
‘You mus’ no’ be scare’,’ our bag-carrier chided us. He’d caught up with us, standing by the open window. ‘Move forwar’! You don’ got to be scare’.’
‘I’m not scared,’ I replied. ‘I just don’t want to get shot.’
Tim was peeking round the corner, up the road. All around us rebels were flat on their bellies while AK rounds screeched uphill, over us.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Dunno. Hard to tell.’
Minutes passed, and then the firing ceased. We emerged back onto the road. No one seemed to be hit.
‘Okay?’
Tim agreed he was. We changed tapes, and kept marching.
Another hour passed and then, half-expectedly, the air filled with a sound like hailstones pinging off a zinc roof. A hundred yards ahead a Government ambush found us: the first volley tore into the trees to my right. Bits of bark rained on me. There was no time to film. At first down on my haunches, then up and running into a storm drain, I saw a school building twenty yards off the road that looked like it would provide good cover. Tim had the same idea. A whistle overhead heralded the arrival of something else. Thump! Thump!
‘Fuck. Mortars?’
Tim was ashen. We were still half in the open.
‘No, RPGs,’ I replied.
We kept going towards the school as the contact exacted a severe toll. The rebel in front of me was shot straight through the torso. He crumpled, gurgling blood, like an obscene rag doll, lungs hissing as his breath escaped from a hole in his chest the size of a watch face. I looked down at him, and filmed. His eyes lost their focus. Other fighters hauled him up onto a truck. Tim was bent over him, shooting stills, while more bullets whipped up the air around us. Tim’s bag-carrier was shot in the head, behind us. A lump of his skull lifted off; part of the left side of his brain was blown out. I had blood on me. Tim was running, filming.
Children carrying guns began crying. Bushmaster, a senior officer in charge of the heavy machine guns, was shouting at them.
‘Wha’ happen? Eh? Y’ nevah see a man die? When de Go’ernmen’ fire you, you reply. You reply!’
He was waving his Kalashnikov towards Taylor’s troops. Droplets of sweat and rain dripped from his beard. The children stopped crying; the soldier’s chest wound stopped hissing. Around us Government bullets mauled the earth, and the children started firing, too. Finally, Tim and I were crouching by the school, breathless.
‘All right, man? This is fucking bonkers. It’s almost impossible to film anything. Are we doing okay?’
I thought we were. Tim was frantically re-loading tape while I caught my breath. At the same time, Bushmaster climbed up on the back of the truck laden with bodies, swinging the rebels’ .50-calibre machine gun, mounted Somali-style on the roll-bar, into action. Taking direct fire, he calmly racked a round into the breech, and let rip. The thick black barrel began singing its deafening bass reply to the Government’s chattering rifles. In less than two minutes, miraculously unscathed, he ended the ambush.
By then we were out of the bush completely; the environment had morphed into a perfect urban film set. The perfume of the forest had vanished, giving way to the damp smell of plaster and abandoned houses. Visibly disconcerted, the rebels, many of whom had never set foot in a large town, eyed the buildings suspiciously. Everyone was tired, sweating, on the verge of wanting to surrender, but it was time to move on.
We were now in the outer suburbs of Monrovia. The rebels’ plan had been to infiltrate the flanks of their main attack with smaller groups of LURD fighters coming in from other forward positions: they hadn’t shown up, and Dragon Master had not left any soldiers behind in the wake of his earlier advance, so the Government army still owned all the territory off the main road. Dragon Master’s party had been swallowed behind enemy lines. Taking back-routes and getting lost in the unfamiliar side streets would have been suicide for Cobra – who ploughed headlong into another ambush before the hour was out.
‘Down, down, down,’ I shouted at Tim, who, two paces ahead of me, was drawing a lot of fire from the front.
A belt-fed machine gun was strafing us. Several of the 300 men and boys who had shortly before been shaking sleep and rain from their bodies were opened up like prime cuts of meat by white-hot shrapnel from RPGs. Wired with adrenaline, I went to look for Cobra. We were being shot to bits. Our defence was unsustainable.
I caught up with him at the back of a house on the shifting front line. He was armed with only a length of electrical cable, and was literally whipping his younger soldiers onwards with it, forcing them out into the field of fire.
‘What’s going on here?’ I asked.
Cobra seemed very calm. He talked so quietly that my camera microphone hardly registered his harsh whisper.
‘We near Iron Gate nah. My men den deh, we wi’ soon mee’ dem.’
I don’t know if Cobra was a good man or not. I don’t know if he was a particularly clever man or not. But I do know that he was a good commander, or at least that he had the qualities of one. Strolling casually out into the arc of Government fire, he now walked calmly in front of the men whom he had just whipped. At that moment, I felt – knew – that as long as I was with him nothing would touch me, because I knew this man would survive.
‘Ready?’
Tim nodded. We sprinted between two houses and then out into the open, aiming for a road bridge that led deeper into the city. It was a couple of hundred yards across open grass to the cover of the houses on the other side. At the halfway point, the shooting began. Cobra was grazed by an AK round. So it goes. Behind me Tim grunted and then fell heavily. Shit, I thought, he’s been hit. I kept running. Stop! My mind barked at me, Go back! But the incoming rounds were close, and for once well aimed, and my legs automatically carried me – running, running, running – to the safety of the house. Turning round, consumed with guilt for having left him, I saw with relief that Tim was up again, and not far behind me.
‘I slipped,’ he said. ‘I’ve lost the mic cover.’
Shame burned deep in my chest. I’d left him behind.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was scared.’
I was. I was petrified. I didn’t know how we’d survived.
‘No, that’s cool,’ he replied, but I didn’t think he’d understood.
‘Let’s go get it,’ I suggested.
‘What, the mic cover?’
‘Yeah. We need it.’
Doubled over, I walked back out into the open, scouring the ground for the tiny foam windshield. Tim followed.
‘All right, this is crazy. Do we really need it?’
We were being shot at again. Rebels behind the house were shouting and waving at us to get down. Impervious to their requests, we carried on looking. I am not scared, I told myself. My mind was a blank. The war had been put on pause. All the noise seemed to fade away while I searched the grass for the missing piece of kit. After a minute or so, two fighters joined us.
‘Found it!’ cried Tim.
And we all darted back to the safety of the house. Happy with our small triumph, I came to my senses. The war crowded in again, deafening and terrible.
From there we ran once more, to a breezeblock wall this time, behind which several of the commanders’ wives had taken refuge. Just beyond them lay the LURD’s advance party. Tim photographed me squatting down as RPGs exploded behind us. We stayed hunched behind the wall while boy-soldiers cowered in the mud beside us. A salvo of rebel RPGs streaked overhead. After what seemed like an age, the tick, tick, tick of incoming rounds diminished and then died. LURD fighters peered above and around their cover, and then apprehensively stepped out into the open. Tim and I braced ourselves and rounded the wall to find the corpses of Government troops lying in the grass around us. Across the w
ide tar road the brown T-shirts of the rebels fanned out in victory. Dragon Master broke away from them and ran up to greet us. We had broken through. We were in the city.
Cobra handed me over to his deputy field commander, Iron Jacket, and we sped off towards the centre of town in a looted four-wheel-drive as scores of civilians lined the roads in a slow procession back from the front.
We made it as far as Freeport, where the rebels had been blocked. Fighting raged over New Bridge – control of which would allow or deny access to the presidential palace. Refugees picked their way through the debris, leaving the area as fast as they could manage. Iron Jacket – dressed in a resplendent yellow T-shirt – fired over their heads, shouting and laughing, forcing them to keep moving. We filmed briefly, and then followed Iron Jacket as he returned to the rebels’ headquarters at a beer factory on the edge of the city.
The scene that greeted us at their HQ was one of devastation. Thousands of refugees had been crammed into the store rooms and loading areas of the beer factory. Terrified, they huddled against each other as the flat booms of the explosions in town echoed off the walls. There was no toilet, no food and no water.
One area had been set aside as an emergency field clinic. The rebels had paid a terrible price to enter the city. Tim and I inspected the rebel wounded from the day’s fighting. The smell of stale beer mixed with a sharp smell of ammonia from soldiers who had wet themselves, and occasionally a suffocating whiff of blood. Several fighters had shrapnel wounds to their legs, where RPGs had detonated on the road in front of them; others had taken AK rounds in their arms or thighs; some had been shot through or disfigured by the explosions that dogged our progress into town. Tim’s bag-carrier was still alive, but as wrecked as Rocket had been. Tim tried to force-feed him a watery rice soup so he wouldn’t vomit the painkillers he’d been given. Beside him lay a dead young man, partly covered by a sheet, his body already twisted from rigor mortis. He wore a brown T-shirt. Printed on it were the words: Too Tough To Die.
I didn’t sleep that night, but the Valium knocked me out enough so that I felt as if I had. When dawn broke, shooting began almost immediately. I called Colonel Frank at US Intelligence, who was still operating in the region. If the LURD were going to try and cross the bridge today, I wanted to know what they might be running into.
‘Hey, James!’ cried Frank across the wheezing connection. ‘Great to hear from you. What’s going on?’
Frank knew perfectly well what was going on. I gave him my position, and filled him in on the fighting so far.
‘It’s really good you called, James. Actually, I’ve been trying to reach you, but your phone’s been down. I would really strongly urge you to leave if you can. Seriously.’
His normally jovial tone was suffused with a serious edge. I hadn’t heard him talk like that before, and I didn’t understand what he meant.
‘What, leave Monrovia? Man, that’s a big ask. I can’t go anywhere without these guys, unless you want to come and get me. Anyway, the channel would go nuts. Why?’
There was no reply. The line dissolved into a mass of static. Whenever a connection became unstable, I did what Nick had taught me and used a sort of pseudo-military radio-speak – that I only half managed to get half-right – to make sure nothing was misunderstood.
‘Frank,’ I shouted, ‘are you receiving me? Over.’
I suddenly felt stupidly self-conscious. It was like being in a movie.
‘Roger that, James. Yes, good copy. You need to leave Liberia. We’ve picked up an intercept. Taylor wants you and Tim dead. Our information is that he has dispatched two units to find you. He has ordered your execution. You need to leave immediately. Do you copy? Over.’
I felt the blood drain from my face.
‘Yeah, roger that. Good copy.’
The previous evening Taylor had claimed to the international media that Freeport was back under Government control. I had been interviewed on my satellite phone shortly after, and immediately exposed that for the lie it was. What was more, the latest report by the UN’s Panel of Experts on Liberia had been released the month before, and drew, in part, on the evidence I’d collected the previous year. Taylor had clearly had enough. I looked around me, and saw Tim filming a hundred yards away.
‘I’ll let you know what my movements are. It’s impossible to say at the moment. Look, if we get cornered, can you send a chopper? Over.’
‘Good copy, James. No, that is a negative at this time. Over.’
‘Great. Thanks. Can you liaise with the Brits and get them to open the bridge at Bo Waterside? Over.’
The bridge was one of the only crossings over the stretch of the Mano River that formed the border between Liberia and Sierra Leone. We had crossed by canoe seventeen days earlier a few miles upstream. An added complication was that, according to a regional treaty, the centre of the river was sovereign Guinean territory, and the bridge was also manned by their soldiers. The bridge had been closed for most of the war. Opening it would be a major diplomatic headache.
‘Good copy. That’s an affirmative. I’ll see what I can do, though I think you’ll find we’re more amenable to you than your own countrymen. Over.’
‘Okay, good copy. Thank you. That doesn’t surprise me.’ I paused for a moment. ‘Frank, one last thing. The rebels want to cross New Bridge. Is that a good idea? Over.’
‘Good copy. Jesus! No. That is a negative. Repeat, a negative. It will be a massacre. Try and persuade them not to.’
‘Roger, copy that. Over and out,’ I said, just in case he was still there, and then hung up.
Nick was out of range, travelling, so I dialled Piet, Nick’s contact in Monrovia. He was with Taylor’s son, Chucky, in the Executive Mansion. I explained that we’d been advised to leave, but gave away nothing specific.
‘Look, James,’ he said, calmly, ‘I’m not advising, I’m insisting that you leave within the next seventy-two hours, for your own security.’
That sealed it. I walked over to Tim and took him lightly by the arm.
‘Sorry, mate.’
He stopped filming and looked at me quizzically.
‘What’s up?’
‘I’m afraid we have a bit of a problem.’
I led him to one side. Eight hundred yards behind us, a firefight crackled away. Front-line commanders rushed in and out of the compound.
We sat on a low wall and I gave him the news from Frank and Piet. He took it in much the same way I had: it was shocking, serious – and posed a conundrum. How were we supposed to get out of Monrovia?
‘This wouldn’t be a problem if Nick was here,’ he concluded.
The fighting behind the compound spooked the civilians in the beer factory. An exodus began that the rebels could not stop. Within minutes, 2,000 women and children vanished into the burning suburbs. The contact was only a few streets away now. I went and found Cobra.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ve just spoken to the Americans. Taylor’s got a lot of firepower on that bridge. They’re advising you don’t cross it now.’
Cobra looked at me, carefully.
‘Okay, tank you.’
He turned and summoned his commanders.
Almost imperceptibly, the mood began to change. More fighters returned from New Bridge, vehicles started lining up near the compound. Behind us, the exchanges of gunfire became heavier, with more incoming crackle and fewer outgoing bangs. It dawned on me what was happening. Cobra, walking past the vehicles, smiled distractedly.
‘Are we leaving?’ I asked.
He looked at me with bemusement.
‘Yes, we wi’ go. De ammunishan finishe’. Don’t worry, I’ de solution fahdah.’
A LURD mortar team was setting up to cover the hasty rebel retreat with an indiscriminate bombardment of the houses around us. I held the viewfinder as steady as I could as the third salvo was fired. The charge detonated and the short, hand-held tube collapsed from the recoil, sending the bomb zipping over my left shoulder, an inch away
from my ear. I had been able to see right down the tube when it went off. I put the camera down and we were bundled into a car that would not start. We cast around unsuccessfully to find anything moving that had space for us. The fighter in the green dress and wig ran past, grabbing Tim’s arm.
He shrieked something into Tim’s face, before running off towards the shooting. Tim ran over to me.
‘What did he want?’
‘He said “I’m going to fuck you up the ass.”’
Tim looked, for the first time, genuinely frightened.
‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
But neither of us knew how. Thirty vehicles lined up. Trucks, Jeeps, town cars, even an articulated lorry, were trying to depart simultaneously. Every shape and size of vehicle vied for position, creating a deadly traffic jam. Tim and I were at the very back. Bushmaster, the commander who had cleared the ambush the day before, signalled for us to get in with him as the Government recovered from their mortaring and started putting fire down over our positions. We clambered into his looted red Range Rover. Bushmaster hung on the side, while the driver, Joe T, smoking a reefer, weaved through the crawling rebel trucks laden down with fighters.
The convoy ground to a halt at Iron Gate under its own weight. We were caught out in the open. From behind us a long screeching sound, like a sharp sonic corkscrew twisting its way through metal and glass, pierced my ears. I looked in the wing-mirror.
‘What the fuck was that?’ Tim shouted from the rear passenger seat.
‘Believe me, you don’t want to know,’ I replied.
My Friend The Mercenary Page 27